ABSTRACT
The author puts an effort to share what he learned over the past year both personally and professionally. In this effort, he uses poetry to express complicated and often ineffable lessons he have experienced, often at the deepest levels of his being. Their experience has starkly taught him just how disconnected the author clinicians are from having a curiosity about his thread. There is comfort residing in the abstractions of the biomedical model. His story becomes one of diagnosis (AML), prognosis (bad), and treatment plan (chemo protocol). All this information fits nicely on the Excel spreadsheet that defines his medical story. To the handful of clinicians who were patient centered. Loss and grief have been inseparable companions for Annalu and him during this past year. Their grief is the natural response to the many losses they have experienced. Grief is neither a problem to be solved nor a disease to be cured.
